Story · Protection · Proactive work
In 2019 we closed a door nobody was asking us to close. In 2020 that turned out to matter.
Through 2019 we ran a project across our client base that no client had asked for and no incident had prompted. We replaced open remote access with proper VPNs and closed the ports behind them. Nothing was broken. We just did not like the door being open.
The situation
The common way to reach a work computer from home, at the time and still today in plenty of places, was to expose the remote desktop service directly to the internet and put a username and password in front of it. It works. It is also the equivalent of leaving a window unlocked and relying on nobody trying the handle.
Attackers scan for those ports constantly. They do not need to break anything; they only need one password that has been reused somewhere else. It was, and remains, one of the most common ways a small business gets encrypted.
None of our clients had been hit. That was the point. This was a project done while nothing was on fire, which is the only time this kind of work is cheap.
What we did
We worked through the client base site by site. VPN configured and deployed onto the machines that needed it, so a person at home connects into the network properly rather than knocking on a port from the public internet.
Then we closed the ports. All of them, not the ones that were convenient. A door that is closed on most firewalls is not closed.
The part that took the longest was the vendors. Every client has software suppliers who reach in to support their own systems, and each one had to be moved onto VPN access and verified. That work is unglamorous, it is invisible when it goes well, and skipping it is how these projects quietly fail.
"You are effectively leaving a window unlocked on your firewall. We would rather close it on a quiet Tuesday than explain it on a bad Monday."
How the engineering team puts itWhat changed
ResolvedIn early 2020 our clients had to send their staff home, some of them within a day. The secure remote access was already built, already deployed and already tested against their vendors.
What that meant in practice is that the scramble was about people rather than infrastructure. Setting up somebody who had never worked remotely, sorting out a home internet connection, working out who needed a laptop. Real work, but not the work of standing up secure access for an entire company in a weekend, which is what a lot of businesses spent that spring doing.
We did not predict a pandemic. We closed a door that should not have been open, a year early, and the year we bought turned out to be worth a great deal.
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The relocation checklist Did you knowA backup that has never been restored is a hope, not a plan. Ask for the date of the last tested restore.
What to actually testQuestions people ask about this
Is remote desktop over the open internet still common?
More common than it should be. It is the first thing we look for in an assessment, and we still find it.
What does proactive actually mean, as opposed to a word in a brochure?
It means work that gets done when nothing is wrong, funded on an argument rather than an emergency. The 2019 VPN project is the clearest example we have. Today it looks like reaching out to clients about compliance exposure before an audit finds it.
How do you decide what to get ahead of?
The engineering team watches what is actually being exploited, not what is being marketed. Then we look at which clients are exposed to it and what it would take to close.
"Another great job by Midwest IT. Our company just loves your fast response to our issues."
Client, 2024 surveyMore from the survey wall- A technician who knows your setup takes every request. Not a dispatcher, not a queue.
- Every closed ticket is surveyed and a partner reads every response.
- 99.5% of surveys come back positive.
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"Thanks for the hard work. I was kept informed with regular updates until the concern was resolved."
Jeff, insurance brokerageWhen did anyone last look at what is exposed?
A protection assessment tells you what is reachable from outside your building. Most owners have never seen the list.
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